What You’re Paying For When You Hire A Wedding Photographer

If you’re planning a wedding, you’ve probably got a long list of things that you need to book for your wedding day. On the top of that list might be a venue and perhaps a wedding planner, and one of the next things that is probably quite high on that list is to book a wedding photographer.

A wedding photographer is one of the most important things that you’re going to invest your money in when you are planning your wedding day. There are there to capture your day so that you’ve got something to look back on for years to come. But when you book a wedding photographer, you’re doing so much more than just hiring someone to take photographs of your day.

What You’re Paying For When You Hire A Wedding Photographer

1. A Wedding Expert

Wedding photographers are wedding experts. They attend a number of weddings each season, and they see how couples do things differently. The see what works for some couples and also what doesn’t work so well. When you book your wedding photographer, you’re booking someone that is experienced in weddings. They know about the intricacies of a wedding day, what special moments to look out for, where to be pointing their camera at certain times during the day. They also know what works the best in terms of timelines and can guide you during your planning process to make sure that you get the most out of your wedding photography.

2. A Photography Expert

Wedding photographers need to be experts in so many different genres of photography. We are expected to create timeless portraits and also work as photojournalists, capturing the action as it happens around us. We need to be able to work with natural light and also understand how to use flash for when it gets darker. And we only get one chance to get it right at every wedding. We know our equipment, its strengths and limitations, and we have to make quick judgements as the light and the situation changes around us.

3. An Artist

Photography is an art, not a science, and every photographer sees light and a scene differently. When you book your wedding photographer, you’re choosing that person to capture your day in their own artistic way.

4. A Curator

Have you ever had to look through a friend’s holiday album and slightly lost interest after seeing 5 almost identical images? A great wedding photographer doesn’t just download images from their camera, put them on a USB drive and job done. Part of the job involves carefully curating the images to create a gallery that reflects the story of your day. They’ll sort through thousands of images, removing ones where people have their eyes closed, duplicate images or where the focus was off, so that your final collection is the very best version of your story.

5. An Editor

Once they have selected the best images from your day (which is usually the most time-consuming part of the editing process), they are going to make these final images look their best. Each image will be optimised for colour, contrast and brightness. Some images might need distracting objects removed or they might decide to add in some creative edits in with your portraits. They might also convert some images to black & white.

6. A Professional

A wedding photographer should be a legitimate professional running a business, and if not, I would think twice about booking them. A professional wedding photographer has professional equipment plus back-up equipment and they also have important things such as contracts and insurance that protect both you and them should something not go as planned.